What’s said in the Green Room is very different from a remark on air

The BBC lives between a rock and a hard place. It must entertain but not rile sensitivities, it must inform, but not bore. It must spend money to attract top talent but not so much that it will foment outrage. And it must do it all on the basis of an involuntary tax called the licence fee, which is both good value but also an imposition.

That puts it in a unique position of accountability. It isn't really surprising that it teeters from one Brand/Ross PR disaster to the next Carol Thatcher-shaped eruption because it struggles to unite divergent roles and convey a single BBC set of values across its output. This is why the corporation's senior executives have responded to Thatcher's foot-in-mouth moment in a trigger-happy way. She was foolish to use a term which is racially loaded and has passed out of polite usage. She would have been far more sensible to apologise.

But the key point is: she did not do so on air. I am a reasonably frequent guest at the BBC, and the Green Room is where the cast and crew of a show can relax and say what they would never dream of saying with the cameras rolling.

We enter an odd world when an apology can be demanded, as opposed to freely given and meant. A lapse on air, which could have caused direct offence to viewers who heard it, is different from a conversation not for broadcast. Of course, the corporation should uphold standards about what is acceptable language in its broadcasts. It cannot and should not enforce these rules off air. For Jay Hunt, the BBC1 controller, to base her argument on location — "She was sitting in a BBC green room on BBC premises surrounded by a diverse production team" — is very troubling.

If she doesn't want a presenter who uses the word "golliwog" in conversation and is prominent enough to have it reported, she should just say so. Where she says it really isn't the point. There is also an awkward sense of ownership in Ms Hunt's tone when it comes to BBC premises: we all pay for them, after all.

I don't envy BBC executives the tightrope they walk in defining and defending the Corporation under all its pressures. But they make it more difficult for themselves when they blunder into the fraught area of culture wars wearing quite such hobnailed boots.